All the World Is a Stage Across the Ancient Silk Road - By Pepe Escobar

 Forget about barbarian propaganda. What really matters, historically, is that the Ancient Silk Roads as well as Xinjiang may well be the ultimate crossroads of civilizations. Along Central Asia, they are the (beating) heart of the Heartland.

ON THE SOUTHERN SILK ROAD – Silk is the stuff of legend. Literally. At first manufactured only in China, silk historically was not only a luxury product but a monetary unit: a key element of trade and export revenues.

In 105 B.C., a first-ever Chinese diplomatic mission landed in Persia, then dominated by the Parthians, who also occupied Bactria, Assyria, Babylon and parts of India. Under the four-century long Arsacid dynasty – contemporary of the Han in China – the Parthians at the time were the essential middlemen of transcontinental trade. Chinese and Parthians sat down to discuss – what else – business.....

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/10/no_author/all-the-world-is-a-stage-across-the-ancient-silk-road/ 

....Well, what we see today started even before the Go West campaign launched in 1999: since 1997, an array of central and state agencies, central state-owned enterprises, and 14 Chinese provinces and municipalities have sent a massive amount of funds and personnel to properly develop Xinjiang.

Now compare all that with original research shared at an academic conference on Xinjiang recently organized by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Hong Kong University – my neighbors when I lived in the Fragrant Harbor. The research showed how British MI6 since the 1990s was instrumentalizing a minority of Uyghurs side by side with a massive global P.R. campaign with the explicit target of breaking China into three parts.

That evolved into the CIA-concocted “genocide” accusations of the past few years and of course “forced labor” masses barely surviving in concentration/re-education camps. In our extensive travels, guided by Uyghurs, we were dead set on finding slave labor in cotton fields along the Northern Silk Road or in the middle of the Taklamakan. Well, sorry: they don’t exist.

The propaganda though was essential to regiment loads of Uyghurs into ISIS, including their sizable contingent in Idlibistan now roaming free between Syria and the Turkish border. They wouldn’t dare coming back to Xinjiang and face Chinese intel.

Forget about barbarian propaganda. What really matters, historically, is that the Ancient Silk Roads as well as Xinjiang may well be the ultimate crossroads of civilizations. Along Central Asia, they are the (beating) heart of the Heartland. And now, once again, they are back as protagonists in the heart of History.